Reseating as a Negotiation
Have a look around Hopscotch Corner and you'll notice some difficult word problems followed by tough questions. It's thinking-optional and we've found no easy answers. We're incrementally introducing Hopscotch for air travel.
We must be building something (we are) and figured something out (we have). Let's dive into a full flight scenario that happens every day, maybe to you, someone you know, or on your flight.
Imagine you're the flight attendant greeting passengers as they board. A passenger seated at the front tells you their child, an underage minor, was assigned a seat at the back. What should you do? Should you negotiate a seat exchange on this full flight? Could you handle this passenger request?
Before asking if this is your job, realize that flight attendants are often asked to help reseat passengers. And "no", while flight reservations and seat assignments may not be your job, you represent the public face of an airline. A minimum response involves courtesy towards a fellow person. You may dislike a reseating request, but you would not ignore it.
You must negotiate with someone here: the passenger making the request, the unaccompanied minor seated in the back or other passengers seated nearby.
This scenario happens throughout the day, every day, as domestic flights prepare to depart. Your actions could delay the departure and closing of aircraft doors. Seat shaming may conclude the negotiation but rarely results in ebullient and cooperative passengers. What about other passengers enduring a seat shaming conversation? Maybe they think, "please, just do not ask me...".
You were drawn into this reseating conversation turned negotiation. Before emotions run high, the art of deescalation comes into play. It doesn't always go smoothly and can go wrong very quickly. We all read social media and the news just like you.
Consider that as a flight attendant, like it or not, you are trapped between a customer and corporate policy. Flight attendant responsibilities continue to expand with travel industry growth. They perform public relations above and beyond safe operation, rehearsed emergency egress, regulation and procedure enforcement and depth of familiarity with aircraft.
How do they do reseat passengers on a full flight? Are they consistent, fair and unbiased? Are they quiet, discreet and respectful? Does this task require style, experience and interpersonal skills? There are no perfect answers, only great questions.
Flight crew paid per flight hour go on the clock only AFTER the aircraft doors close. Don't just take my word for it. Read it in the words of a flight attendant.
How might working for free make you feel about passenger reseating as being your problem. Would it affect your negotiation style? How would it affect your approach of the other passengers?
Delegating seat changes to a flight attendant may delay departure for several minutes or more. Anecdotal evidence, while anecdotal, helped us think how airline staff could handle it at the gate as our model. We would first identify cooperative passengers or else it becomes a time sink.
We took this scenario to the next level by asking, "What if the flight attendant had to do reseating for the entire flight?". That's a tall order, seat wrangler. This flight has places to be and people to move.
We decided our system must be able to:
Like all good stories, we have a beginning, middle, and, from the passenger perspective, an end. We designed an app user interface for passengers as our starting point. Some sample screens are below:
First we eliminate the infeasible, identify the feasible and let a math model generate both passenger-to-seat and seat-to-passenger matches. This produces passenger-to-passenger matches in both directions.
So it works forward and backwards, like the negotiation completed under time constraints. Look closer at the image above and notice we included a timer to allow consideration and expiry of offers to meet a deadline.
So far so good. Now how do we construct this system without speaking (no output speaker), seeing (no camera) or hearing (no microphone). And now we only read and write using two letters, like a computer. They tirelessly perform repetitive tasks, high speed calculations and provide comparison results without introducing empathy or bias.
We created a model where there was none and applied mathematics to control what would happen. This leaves the best part up to the passengers who know what they like and dislike given mutually exclusive alternatives. If we were the gate agent had perfect information and knew,
Hopscotch builds automation we can understand. Airlines have many complex interactions under time constraints in real time and batch processed. Enterprise systems generate seat pricing models driven by time, route, popularity and profit. Goodness of seat assignment to passenger preference is complex; even intractable.
The nature of the two-way, dual direction and two-sided transaction were the sources of the complexities. Enter Hopscotch and the Hopscotch API (Application Program Interface):
We must be building something (we are) and figured something out (we have). Let's dive into a full flight scenario that happens every day, maybe to you, someone you know, or on your flight.
Imagine you're the flight attendant greeting passengers as they board. A passenger seated at the front tells you their child, an underage minor, was assigned a seat at the back. What should you do? Should you negotiate a seat exchange on this full flight? Could you handle this passenger request?
Before asking if this is your job, realize that flight attendants are often asked to help reseat passengers. And "no", while flight reservations and seat assignments may not be your job, you represent the public face of an airline. A minimum response involves courtesy towards a fellow person. You may dislike a reseating request, but you would not ignore it.
You must negotiate with someone here: the passenger making the request, the unaccompanied minor seated in the back or other passengers seated nearby.
This scenario happens throughout the day, every day, as domestic flights prepare to depart. Your actions could delay the departure and closing of aircraft doors. Seat shaming may conclude the negotiation but rarely results in ebullient and cooperative passengers. What about other passengers enduring a seat shaming conversation? Maybe they think, "please, just do not ask me...".
You were drawn into this reseating conversation turned negotiation. Before emotions run high, the art of deescalation comes into play. It doesn't always go smoothly and can go wrong very quickly. We all read social media and the news just like you.
Consider that as a flight attendant, like it or not, you are trapped between a customer and corporate policy. Flight attendant responsibilities continue to expand with travel industry growth. They perform public relations above and beyond safe operation, rehearsed emergency egress, regulation and procedure enforcement and depth of familiarity with aircraft.
How do they do reseat passengers on a full flight? Are they consistent, fair and unbiased? Are they quiet, discreet and respectful? Does this task require style, experience and interpersonal skills? There are no perfect answers, only great questions.
Flight crew paid per flight hour go on the clock only AFTER the aircraft doors close. Don't just take my word for it. Read it in the words of a flight attendant.
How might working for free make you feel about passenger reseating as being your problem. Would it affect your negotiation style? How would it affect your approach of the other passengers?
Delegating seat changes to a flight attendant may delay departure for several minutes or more. Anecdotal evidence, while anecdotal, helped us think how airline staff could handle it at the gate as our model. We would first identify cooperative passengers or else it becomes a time sink.
We took this scenario to the next level by asking, "What if the flight attendant had to do reseating for the entire flight?". That's a tall order, seat wrangler. This flight has places to be and people to move.
We decided our system must be able to:
- Allow passengers to self-identify cooperation level,
- Track multiple reseating requests and situations,
- Allow for constraints and preferences,
- Consider the groups and families separately,
- Compute possibilities for mutual cooperation,
- Compare relative seat valuations, and
- Allow for negotiation time.
Like all good stories, we have a beginning, middle, and, from the passenger perspective, an end. We designed an app user interface for passengers as our starting point. Some sample screens are below:
So it works forward and backwards, like the negotiation completed under time constraints. Look closer at the image above and notice we included a timer to allow consideration and expiry of offers to meet a deadline.
So far so good. Now how do we construct this system without speaking (no output speaker), seeing (no camera) or hearing (no microphone). And now we only read and write using two letters, like a computer. They tirelessly perform repetitive tasks, high speed calculations and provide comparison results without introducing empathy or bias.
We created a model where there was none and applied mathematics to control what would happen. This leaves the best part up to the passengers who know what they like and dislike given mutually exclusive alternatives. If we were the gate agent had perfect information and knew,
- Who was willing and cooperative,
- What each passenger was willing to do,
- Who was helping whom
then the model is still complex because of time constraints to manually deliver the offers and negotiate responses as accept or reject.
Hopscotch builds automation we can understand. Airlines have many complex interactions under time constraints in real time and batch processed. Enterprise systems generate seat pricing models driven by time, route, popularity and profit. Goodness of seat assignment to passenger preference is complex; even intractable.
The nature of the two-way, dual direction and two-sided transaction were the sources of the complexities. Enter Hopscotch and the Hopscotch API (Application Program Interface):
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